1 JOURNALISTS: THE BÊTE NOIRE OF ORGANIZED CRIME © Pexel.com CONTENTS Foreword 4 Shut up or die Crime terminology 6 Mafias and cartels Disturbing figures 1. Emergence of a European mafia 8 Murders in three EU countries in less than a year 8 • Slovakia: Ján Kuciak wasn’t just annoying the ‘Ndrangheta • Malta: symbol of persecution of investigative journalists • Bulgaria: journalist’s murder under investigation Organized crime tightens hold on many European countries 12 • In Italy: Saviano, Borrometi and 194 others • Two journalists protected around the clock in the Netherlands • France not spared Balkan journalists and Russian mob 19 • Jovo Martinovic in Montenegro • Albania: smeared, hounded and threatened, Alida Tota keeps going Soft control: infiltrating the media 20 • A Bulgarian deputy and oligarch’s media empire 2. Take care, subject off limits 22 Drug cartels show no pity towards journalists 22 • At least 32 Mexican journalists killed by cartels since 2012 • Colombia: no-go areas Environmental journalists targeted by local gangs 24 • India’s sand mafia sows death • Journalists versus Cambodia’s sand cartels • John Grobler runs into Cosa Nostra in Namibia © Pexel.com Organized crime allied with corrupt businessmen and politicians 27 • Poland: Tomasz Piatek versus Russian mafia • Russia: politicians and hitmen • Turkey: pro-government gangster’s blacklist Japanese media keep mum about the yakuza 30 • Yakuza – they who shall not be named 3 • Interview with US journalist Jake Adelstein: “The yakuza use the media as an instrument of pressure” 3. How to respond to the threat from organized crime 33 State protection… often not enough 33 • Mexico: inadequate protection • Italy: vigilance and blackmail • Slovakia: protected for a few weeks • Combating impunity: need for thorough investigations When the pressure is too much 39 • Exile • “I decided to close the newspaper,” interview with a Mexican editor Journalists resist 41 • Avoiding isolation: Pavla Holcová’s method • Reducing the risks: Río Doce editor Ismael Bojórquez: “We never gave up” • Stay in the shadows, say two journalists in Africa Counting on solidarity 44 • Italian method • Era of collaborative media investigations NFOREWORDN Shut up or die Organized crime knows no borders, scorns the rule of law in democracies, and leaves little choice to journalists, who have limited resources and are extremely vulnerable. The only choice for reporters is often to say nothing or risk their lives. Either they don’t do their job as journalists or, by violating the criminal code of silence, they expose themselves to terrible reprisals from organizations that stop at nothing to defend their interests. Such is the dangerous dilemma for the media. And it’s not just in Italy, the cradle of the mafia, or in Mexico, where narcos control entire swathes of the country. The Mob has spread its tentacles around the globe faster than all the multinationals combined and has spawned offspring whose virulence matches their youth. From Beijing to Moscow, from Tijuana to Bogotá, from Malta to Slovakia, investigative journalists who shed light on the deals that involve organized crime unleash the wrath of gangsters, whose common feature is an aversion to any publicity unless they control it. Very sensitive to whenever their image is at stake, organized crime’s godfathers do not hesitate to crack down on any reporter who poses a threat. Those who tell the truth deserve to die. For exposing the sordid underside of the Italian mafia’s activities, writer and journalist Roberto Saviano has been condemned to living under permanent police protection, with less freedom of movement than those he exposes, who threaten to kill him. The criminal underworld is always masked, but the biggest danger for the investigative reporter nowadays is not necessarily the ruthless, bloodthirsty individuals who people this world; rather, in many countries, organized crime has established a kind of pact with the state, to the point that you cannot tell where one stops and the other begins. © Freeimages.com / Mateusz Atroszko © Freeimages.com / Mateusz Atroszko © Freeimages.com © CCO 5 How is it possible that Mexico’s drug cartels sprout and flourish like mushrooms without the support of part of the state’s apparatus in the field? How do you explain the murky links between the yakuza and state in Japanese society? How do these small armies at the head of sprawling business empires manage to live outside the law without the — at least passive — complicity of the states in which they are often well established? Far from combatting them head-on, states tolerate them and give them a free hand by omission. By, for example, failing to apply controls in ports and airports. Organized crime does not fight states; it seeks to merge with them. Instead of trying to exercise power, it wants to control it or rather to contaminate it. Journalists who try to draw attention to organized crime’s corruption of the political and business elite in their country must brave not only gangsters, but also white-collar crime that has married its interests to those of the gangsters whose antennae reach into the very heart of the state. Those who tackle this almost institutional impunity need to know that they will be alone at the hour of reprisals, especially in countries where the special units that are supposed to combat organized crime have become no more than cosmetic tools for assuaging public opinion. “A mafia is not a cancer born by chance from healthy tissue,” said Giovanni Falcone, the anti-mafia Italian judge who was murdered on May 23, 1992. Investigative reporting that tries to identify the diseased tissue’s ailments is nowadays a deadly activity. Here is the evidence. Frédéric Ploquin [ CRIME TERMINOLOGY ] Mafias and cartels Organized crime families, or mafias, are secret societies with antennae and branches reaching beyond their borders, whose main goal is profit using corruption and fear to prosper. They differ from criminal associations that are formed for a specific project and then disbanded. The only way to leave a mafia family is by dying or turning state’s evidence. Organized crime families use influence and violence to obtain silence both within their own ranks and outside them. With strong roots in the territory where they operate, woven into its social fabric, they subjugate the population and impose their code of silence. Those who betray the family are not just excluded from the group; they also risk their lives. Organized crime families compete with the state. They assert economic and business control and tend to take on justice and police functions. They penetrate the centers of authority in order to control any attempts to combat them. They have an international reach based on migration and control of their diasporas. The Italian mafia, the Chinese triads, and the Japanese boryokudan or yakuza are the archetypes. Comparable groups are found in Russia and other former Soviet countries, in Turkey and in Albania. The Latin American cartels, the latest variation on this model, are both criminal groups based on predation, military groups often recruiting from within special forces, and political militias capable of exercising territorial and social control. To maintain terror, they go so far as to recruit former soldiers or policemen as “sicarios” (hitmen) to eliminate rivals and terrorize the population and police. Their aim is not to overthrow the state but to induce the police, military and judicial system to refrain from disrupting their activities. The amounts of money handled by these organizations are so large that they play an essential role in the economy of some countries. The business activities of these organized crime families include drug trafficking, cigarettes, racketeering, prostitution, forgery, migrant smuggling, arms trafficking, loan sharking, kidnapping, waste management, gambling, agricultural fraud and European Union subsidy swindles. Marilù Mastrogiovanni, a journalist based in southern Italy’s Puglia region who has been under police protection since being threatened a year ago by the local criminal family, the Sacra Corona Unita, describes the mafia as a state within the state. The name is different in each region—Costa Nostra in Sicily, ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria and Camorra in Campania—and each has its own history, but all have the same ability to infiltrate the real, supposedly clean, economy. This is a worldwide tendency. Crime families invest their illegal earnings in legal business activities, often abroad, especially in Germany or in London, and often with the same idea: offering a sufficiently respectable façade in order to obtain EU subsidies. The Italians have a name for it: “i mafiosi dai colletti bianchi” (white-collar mafiosi). These are tomorrow’s multinationals, ones that cannot stand anyone poking a nose into their accounts. Their No. 1 concern is to not attract the attention of politicians and, less still, the police. Their enemy is the journalist who, with a single article or single video, can topple an empire. DISTURBING FIGURES Organized crime groups have killed more than 30 journalists in the past two years alone. 7 Number killed in 2018 ? ? ? ? 4 Mexico + 3 Brazil 3 Ecuador/ 1 India 1 Slovakia (4 cases being investigated) Colombia In 2018, criminal organizations have murdered a total of 12 journalists in reprisal for their reporting, and there have been at least 4 other murders of journalists in Mexico that are being investigated to establish whether they were linked to their journalism. These already disturbing figures could fall far short of the reality in these countries. In Mexico, the police and judicial systems move slowly or deliberately arrest the wrong people when both narcos and politicians wanted to silence a journalist. In some cases, absolutely no investigations are carried out. Number killed in 2017 9 Mexico 1 Brazil 1 Honduras 1 Maldives 1 Russia 1 Malta At least 14 journalists were murdered in 2017 by criminal groups or groups with suspected links to organized crime.